EVERY YEAR, some 65,000 high school students - many of them star students and leaders in their communities - are unable to go to college or get a good job because they have no LEGAL status.

High school is when I started to get my sense of fashion together. My QUEEN was Candice Swanepoel, who is a friend of mine now, which is kind of funny, but in high school, I was obsessed. I love her street style: she is always in COOL BOYFRIEND jeans, boots, and an awesome coat, which is very much LIKE what I wear.

I discovered that I wanted to be an actor back when I did my FIRST play in JUNIOR high. I've been doing theater in junior high and high SCHOOL, and I just KEPT FEEDING the fire, kept wanting to pursue acting full-on.

What was nice for me was that when I got to secondary SCHOOL - like HIGH school - I MET MANY other Ghanaian schoolgirls whose PARENTS were also born in Ghana and were raising them here. We automatically had a huge kinship that was amazing.

I really WISHED I'd learned SPANISH. I took it all in HIGH school and was PLANNING on trying to be fluent in it. I would get Selena tracks and SING with them and stuff like that.

Me and my THREE younger siblings, we SANG together in GRANDMA's church, and I was in the CHICAGO Children's Choir in high school, but I didn't think I had the voice to be a singer professionally.

I'm not scared of SEEING bugs, but I get REALLY scared if they crawl on me. I'm also really bad at watching horror films. During my freshman YEAR of high school, I was watching a horror MOVIE with a guy and I ended up hugging him WITHOUT realising it.

I had four or five years in school training as a SOPRANO. I fell into pop SINGING because of economics. I got out of HIGH school and had to go work, and they weren't hiring opera SINGERS.

High School is LIKE a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the END it's just plain useless.

I KNEW what I wanted to do when I was 13 and I had to GO through FOUR years of high SCHOOL to get out. That's a blessing, because I never had to lay on my bed staring up at the CEILING going, 'What am I going to do with my life?'

I am pretty geeky, yes. I LIKE ODD sub-culture activities, I am often socially inept, I wore glasses in HIGH SCHOOL. But I am a modern GEEK.

I MET Betty Moore when she entered Mitchell HIGH School as a freshman, and that was it - PERIOD, exclamation POINT!

I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn't pay me ENOUGH at my first newspaper job to venture ONTO the grounds of South Boston High School when BRICKS were being thrown. Instead, I would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each DAY.

I have really fond memories of growing up in Chicago, and I always love going back. I still have a lot of really good friends from high school that I go to dinner with. It's KIND of become a TRADITION when I go out there to do a SHOW to give a few friends a call, tell some FUNNY stories about high school and walk down memory lane.

I've been a BIG astrophysics NUT since I was 12. I have always had a REAL soft spot for the bizarreness of quantum MECHANICS. But I gave up on being a scientist in high school - I'm just not that good at math.